Constitutional Changes: More on the Church That Never Was

In the first post in this series examining the history of the changes to the Church's Constitution which were finalized in 1901, we looked at how that venerable governing document, first signed in 1789, fared at the General Convention which met one hundred years later. Although a number of issues were raised concerning its need for revision, the General Convention of 1889 was unable to reach a consensus on all but one of them, and passed the baton to the next triennial meeting.

General Convention of 1892 met in Baltimore, but was marked by even more disagreement in the Constitutional sphere than had occurred at the preceding gathering. Difficulties began when the House of Bishops took up the one Constitutional amendment which had passed at General Convention 1889, namely, an amendment to Article V which would allow General Convention to accept from any diocese a cession of some of its territory, to become a missionary diocese. The House first voted to approve the amendment on second reading, only to discover the next day that the action of the Convention in 1889 in adopting the proposed language had not been communicated by the Secretary of the House of Deputies to each of the dioceses for their consideration in the interim. (Some argued that there had been technical compliance with the requirement, in that the Secretary had sent to each diocese bound and printed copies of the complete journal of the Convention, which included the amendment in question.) The House of Bishops voted to reconsider its approval, and to refer the issue of compliance to its Committee on Amendments to the Constitution.

In due course, that Committee recommended that a one-time exception to the notice requirement be made, but its recommendation was not implemented, and the House of Bishops never voted to re-adopt the amendment (although the House of Deputies did), so the measure never passed. Nonetheless, the Convention agreed to recognize the new and limited boundaries declared by the Diocese of Michigan, and to treat the remainder of its former territory as a de facto missionary diocese.

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